CBR15Bingo — History
I love, love, loved this book. This is a highlight of my reading year so far and a real keeper for my library of royal books. I do wonder what it is about royalty that tends to attract gay men — glamour? — because I felt very in sympathy with Pope-Hennessy’s fascination with royalty as a separate species of human beings throughout (I related very much to him being described as unremittingly homosexual in the introduction). As someone with a not insubstantial collection of Edward VII 1902 coronation porcelain, this book was right up my alley in terms of its gimlet eye on the British royalty.
This book is made up of Pope-Hennessy’s notes as he did the research for his biography of Queen Mary, with Hugo Vickers adding explanatory notes throughout. I personally found his point of view really fascinating and seeing how someone goes about ingratiating themselves with royalty to get the information they need while being devastatingly cutting behind their backs in his notes was very interesting. Pope-Hennessy is extremely amusing and droll, and he’s a fun person to experience his research through. As he works his way through minor and greater nobility and their hangers on, he gives the reader an unfiltered look into a cloistered world. With my particular interest in the Edwardian period, I also liked this book because it provided more information about personalities who I’ve encountered in my other reading and the way Pope-Hennessy describes them is just such a delight and so much fun to read. His depiction of the Duchess of Windsor in particular (“could have been designed for a medieval playing-card,” “her jawbone is alarming,” etc) is especially cutting and cruel but really brings her home in detail.
The only thing that I didn’t like about this book is that there’s not another one, and it made me quite sad to read about his murder (officially manslaughter, but if you tie someone up and beat them until they choke to death on their blood, it falls under murder in my book). He was going to do a Noël Coward biography but was killed before he got the chance to write it, which feels like a pretty grievous loss, as well as the loss of him as a person. His brother’s description of him before his death as his drinking got the better of him (“his haunted face registers despair”) was quite chilling to me and got me thinking about how destructive drinking can be to one’s internal and external lives.
This book is well worth reading for anyone interested in how biographies are written, the royal family, or just witty and incisive commentary on the foibles of human nature.
Warnings for: manslaughter, alcoholism, child abuse